Dulcinea in the Factory
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first debt is to the many retired women and men who sat with me for long hours, sharing their memories of working lives spent in Medellín’s tex- tile mills. Whether they agreed to let another take their turn at the domino tables of the Asociación de Jubilados to answer questions for twenty or thirty minutes, or they invited me into their homes for hours of taped conversation, sometimes over various days, their willingness to talk to me provided me not only with ‘‘material’’ but also with inspiration. Special thanks are due those who immediately took an interest in my research, introducing me to friends and family members who might also agree to record their memories of mill- work. I am no less indebted to the retirees who simply made me think, even if by sending me away brusquely, as did a woman who pronounced: ‘‘I worked for thirty years, working is no fun. There’s nothing else to say.’’ Whether I have succeeded or failed to understand what retirees tried to communicate in our cross-generational conversations, I am grateful that I had an opportunity to listen. My family in Medellín adopted my research as it adopted me, a long-lost gringa cousin. María Ester Sanín and Juan Guillermo Múnera contributed in a thousand ways, providing moral and material support from beginning to end. Not even they know how much their example has taught me about giving, about comradeship, and about how to do the seemingly impossible: be optimistic about Colombia’s future. I owe a special debt to Jaime Sanín Echeverri and to the late José Sanín Echeverri, who explained Antioqueño expressions, laughed over my tapes, lent me the car, and vouched for me to factory archivists; I’m sorry to have known so jovial a grand-uncle for so short a time. My time in Medellín has also been made special by the kindness